Adobe has also benefited because rich-media advertising is a vertically integrated industry built almost exclusively around their Flash standard. Ad agencies, ad serving providers, and publishers all have built interlocking systems for creating, trafficking, and serving Flash-based ad units. Just ask Microsoft: their Silverlight rich-media spec remains a modest blip on the rich-media radar after years of trying to break through. Even Microsoft’s own online advertiser portal provides submission guidelines for Flash, not Silverlight.

The Attractiveness of Omniture

Omniture, for its part, has built an impressive business as well: two in three of the top 50 online retailers and almost half of the top 500 retailers all rely Omniture’s tools . Brands benefit from a suite of tools that help marketers maximize on-site acquisition and conversion.

The play for Adobe, then, is simply the marriage of these two powerful forces, creating a single entity that combines the immersive qualities of rich media with the insights and addressability of precision analytics. Agencies could presumably extract a premium for campaigns that deliver this one-two punch of immersion and precision. If designers “fell in love” with Omniture as they have with Adobe, it would make it easier to integrate analytics into campaigns from their inception, reducing the barriers to getting insightful data on campaign performance.

Now the Bad News

The marriage makes sense, but it is far from a slam dunk for the companies and their customers.

Clash of Cultures. Omniture is a product for marketers, web analysts, and businesses whereas Adobe is all about designers. Designers do not (always) love metrics because it brings a new accountability to their work, one that is tied to actual user behavior.

Clash of Workflow. Most agree that Omniture is an extremely robust toolset. But with robustness comes complexity: it is very difficult to fully use to its capability without massive investments in both time and labor. So too with Flash. Asking designers to retool their creative process to become more data aware, while simultaneously asking analysts to infiltrate the creative process presents challenges to agency traditions and workflows.

Clash of Technology Platforms. Omniture has acquired and developed numerous products in recent years. They continue to struggle to integrate them into one concise package, essentially adding new cogs to the machine without the true benefits of integration. Witness the recent issues in moving HitBox customers over to SiteCatalyst among other examples: Customers without large implementation contracts have yet to move and take advantage of the new tools.

Omniture’s struggles to integrate technologies are typical: In businesses around the globe, true integration between disparate tech platforms is the exception rather than the rule. The overwhelming majority of tech integration efforts fail, are abandoned, or end up only partially implemented despite massive overruns in time and money . This fact does not bode well for Adobe-Omniture.

Alienated Customers. Current customers might see some of this writing on the wall and take their business elsewhere. Omniture has less-than-stellar customer support after the sale; the likelihood that that this would improve post merger is low.

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This post is an excerpt from "Adobe + Omniture: Implications for Ad Agencies and Brand Managers."

Download the full white paper here.

To those reviews, we would add, "waste of the bandwidth used to download" and "supremely frustrating".

Here's What's Right With It. In a departure from our usual curmudgeonly ways, we will grant BofA a few points for at least trying to do something on the third screen, and for having the presence of mind to jump on the hype bandwagon that is the iPhone App Store.

But that's where our generosity ends.

Here's What's Wrong With It...

A Cosmetic Effort at Best.At the time the App Store opened, the BofA app offered precious little functionality beyond what could be had via any mobile browser. Translation: not worth the download.

No Effort to Exploit the Medium. The iPhone delivers the best mobile web experience bar none, and you'd think the geeks at BofA would have exploited the large screen and touch interface. No such luck.

While the app's splash screen hints of a iPhone-tastic app, it goes quickly down hill from there with a UI built for old-school mobile web, crowded links, etc. Couldn't a simple tweak to the CSS fix this?

Common Tasks and Need-to-Know Data Are Buried. And we do mean buried. Want to know your balance? Six clicks. Want to know if a transaction has cleared? Eight clicks (see the image at right). Argh!

Here's How To Make it Better

Minimize the Number of Clicks. We don't need layers and layers before we get to see useful information. This applies to the sign in experience as well as search for things like retail locations and ATMs (4 clicks!). Finding ATMs should be a one-click item.

Put Balance Info in the Top Layer of the UI. The #1 task online is checking balances. BofA does a decent job of putting this info up front when logging in to online banking via the desktop. So why is this information buried when using the mobile web? Should be a persistent data point throughout the experience.

Use Screen Real Estate More Effectively. Scrolling beats pagination hands down, especially on the iPhone. We'd prefer swiping to view transactions rather than hunting for the tiny button buried at the bottom of the screen. Bonus: Incorporate a toolbar for these essential activities.

Exploit Location Information. Why do we have to work so hard to find ATMs? Better integration with Google maps and the iPhone location capabilities has been completely overlooked. Give us a one-click proximity map of those precious cash machines! (UPDATE: an updated version of the BofA adds location-awareness, but the UI problems cited above still remain).

Innovate. Newcomers Buxfer.com and Mint.com are the freshest things we've seen in online personal finance in a decade. Think quicken-meets-delicious-powered-by-ajax. Consolidate all your accounts and credit cards to a single master dashboard, tag transactions a la del.icio.us makes it super easy to view categories and trends, built in charts and graphs, etc.

The Bottom Line

Banking on the fly is ripe for innovation and we were expecting a far-better effort from one of the category leaders. Two thumbs way down.

Take search. Most everybody has some experience with Google Maps on the desktop, but iPhone 1.0 users have had this familiar experience upended in highly pleasurable ways: How about triangulating your approximate location on a map?

Sounds mundane, but with a location-aware mobile device in your hand, you now have an absolutely awesome way to explore an unfamiliar city on foot (as Bigfathuge did on recent trips to NYC and Hong Kong).

It Gets Better. With the release of iPhone 3G, geek hipsters can now go all GPS on your old school phone, pulling down satellite data for turn-by-turn directions, seeing live traffic snarls and more.

Location functionality is integrated into the address book too, so remembering directions to infrequent contacts (viz., our tax-prep guy who we visit once a year) is a thing of the past. Finding the nearest coffee shop, hip art gallery, or Kinko's will never be the same. With the recent announcement of Google AdSence for mobile, brands will have new ways to engage.

Its beauty, as they say, is in its utility.

Proximity Networking

Here's a new twist on social networks: whereas your old-school social network was defined by the peeps with whom you share an interest or history, proximity networks are about interacting with peeps who are simply near you (whether or not they are friends).

Brightkite, Loopt, and others are new ways to interact with social networks on mobile devices. If this was only about Facebook on the small screen, we wouldn't be very excited. What proximity networks offer is a new way to share experiences and interact with people in your real life while doing real stuff (scary concept, we know).

This is pretty cool stuff, and none of it has been lost on Michael Arrington:

"Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar."

via Techcrunch

Here at Bigfathuge HQ, we've been putting Brightkite through its paces and have been impressed so far. No GPS required, users just volunteer their location (zip code or city name etc) and then have the ability to share that info with friends or strangers (it even integrates with other services like Twitter).

So while Twitter and Friendfeed give you lifestreams, Brightkite gives you placestreams - comments, pix, ephemera that are contributed by dozens of people who've been to (or who are currently experiencing) the location where you're standing. Like ghosts, these contributions accrete around a location and susequent visitors can see the notes of visitors past.

Check out the placestreams for London, Lawrence KS, or Tokyo.

Users can save a list of "placemarks" for places you visit regularly (fav bar, the office, downtown hot spot) so you can keep tabs on what's happening at their favorite haunts.

Urbanspoon

We've saved the best for last. While not a network per se, Urbanspoon is iPhone app for finding restaurants near you; it looks up your location via triangulation, and presto you get a listing of the restaurants, cuisines and price points.

Can't make up your mind where to go? Shake your phone and the it spins out a "winning suggestion" like a slot machine:

Urbanspoon integrates digg-style votes, reviews from Yelp along with basic address and phone number. You'll never have to hunt blindly for a place to grab a bite!

Clicking the address brings up Google maps, and together with your current location pulled from GPS or triangulation, you've got step-by-step directions to that hip new bistro everybody's been talking about right in the palm of your hand.

Asleep at the wheel we were.

Forgetting the unreliability of our trend radar, we at Bigfathuge have to conclude that unconferences are no longer edge experiences for geek hipsters.  To wit: big business has commandeered the format.

We are speaking specifically about marketing services giant WPP and their recent announcement of Stream08. In an email to invitees, WPP Chief Executive Sir Martin Sorrell and tech entrepeneur Yossi Vardi put it this way:

"You are invited to WPP's second free-form, camp-like, super-democratised, extreme (non-virtual) social networking, anti-conference: Stream08."

-Internal WPP email

Who could resist such an invitation?  A staffer here at Bigfathuge HQ was lucky to score an invite to the October event in Athens.  We'll be sharing the goings-on here so stay tuned.

In the meantime, check out the 2007 happenings including the blogesphere reaction, the 2007 Facebook group, flickr pix, and vids.

Updates >> Followers

As you pump out the updates on Twitter, especially if your updates have some marginally useful information or are a thoughtful response to the posts of others, you'll find that complete strangers will begin to follow you. Protocol seems to dicatate that you, in turn, should follow these folks.

But, to put it bluntly, who is really worth your time to follow? If you choose a compulsive schmuck, your twitterstream will fill up with rapid-fire bursts about star trek tweet-ups or reflections on bodily functions. Who has the time for this?

If, on the other hand, you don't "return the follow", you've lost the chance to score ego points by boosting your follower count (let's be honest, its gotta be a point of pride for some that they have a few dozen, a few hundred, or thousands of followers just like your ratings on ebay).

What's a Twitter-er to do?

Twitter Could Do A Better Job of Helping You Decide Whether a Return Follow Is Justified

The current experience: When a person follows you twitter, you get a terse email notice from the system like this:

Pretty bland...no information whatsoever about who this person is, or if they would enhance your Twitter life.

You're faced with a decision to go check them out, and decide whether you should follow.

The Solution Already Exists

What can't the notification email include the new follower's profile info and their recent posts? Waay more useful! Its just protocol: a proper introduction like your mother would want.

Cross-network calendar syncing is such a pervasive problem, you'd think in these days of open architectures and the programmable web, we'd have solved this problem. And yes, we know about all the online calendars out there (Google finds 31 million hits!); clearly availability isn't the problem.

The problem is a variant of the installed-base problem: maintaining multiple calendars by hand is so onerous that the vast majority of people choose to stay locked into (insert your app here). For decades, its been a monumental task to get real-time data - calendar data in particular - out of Outlook-Exchange and into some other system/device.

The Microsoft, um, "Solution". We thought we had a solution when we discovered calendar sharing in Office 2007. But it quickly went down hill. Do you "publish" the calendar or "share it"? How is this different from "send it via email"? Is it Office Online or Office Live or Windows Live/Hotmail calendar? What if we have Office 2007 and the other guys have Office 2003? Typical Microsoft approach to engineering: confuse the user with waaaay to many options, spotty functionality, kludgey UI, assume everybody has the latest-and-greatest, and etc.

Google To the Rescue...Sorta. When we saw the Google Calendar-Outlook sync announcement, we felt all tingly in our nether regions. "Finally somebody with smarts has figured this out" - you install a small app, hit the sync button, and viola! Real-time, standards-based, RSS-enabled, web-ified, mobile-friendly, cross-network sharing, right?

The reality: Spotty. GCal picked up some, but mysteriously, not all of our calendar events. Sorta hit and miss, with about 3-4 events per week not showing up on GCal despite being on Outlook (!?). Re-syncing and refreshing the browser had no effect. Maybe its a Firefox issue? Nope. Tried it on IE, Firefox and Safari. Our bigfathuge staffers can sync iPhone to their Outlook calendar, it works fine. Seems to be a GCal thing. Ugh!

Plaxo: The only solution we have tried that sorta lives up to its promise is Plaxo. It syncs well, is cross-platform, and is web-enabled. Their shortcoming is that calendar sharing is limited to your existing contacts: no "on demand" capabilities with brand new colleagues (or their admins).  UPDATE: Robert Scoble seems to agree with us on this point.

Bottom Line: When they schedule the revolution, will somebody call or send a text? We really don't want to miss it.

So it's probably no surprise that we've got a bigfathuge crush on Nicole Atkins. She dropped into our world as the cover story on CMJ's monthly mag, and also as the lead song on their sampler CD ("Party's Over" from Neptune City). She's new to the world as far as we can tell; metacritic hasn't picked her up on its radar.

Allmusic.com says she calls to mind Roy Orbison (owing to her wiggly-delish vibrato and retro/reverb thang). Like Loretta Lynn and Jenny Lewis, Nicole is an intoxicating departure from the "breathy-lighweight" (iTunes) female vocalist tradition.

On "Party's Over", the chorus breaks over us like a warm drink; the layers of her voice singing harmony with herself, the swelling strings, and the hiccup beat on the drum track make us want to go back and start the track again and again.

Check out her Letterman appearance and tell us if you, too, don't just melt.

More at http://www.nicoleatkins.com/

Louise Leakey had technical difficulties and her delivery was spotty; but some interesting notions and a great quote "Seeing what others have seen before and thinking what hasn't been thought before"

Surprise teleconference from Stephen Hawking, with the requisite set of questions a la "what was before the big bang?" and "life appeared spontaneously here; why not elsehwere; chances are nonzero" and "are we alone?".

Microsoft announcement of the worldwidetelescope. I am sincerely impressed.

Particia Burchat's discussion of dark matter and dark energy. The first time I've felt like I kinda understand it when the talk about bending light and time.

Peter Ward's talk was the highlight of the day for me. Paleontologist with a dim view of prevailing notions of mass exinctions. His book on the topic of why complex life is uncommon in the universe seems to contradict Hawkin's suggestions. Headed to the bookstore to get it.

John Hodgman. Two words: anal probe.

Lots of activity on twitter, pix on flickr and tons of posts on the blogosphere.  Read the official ted blog.